There are well documented patterns of player behavior on a corporate or alliance level in Eve that happen when a corporation or alliance are faced with intense adversity. Many wars in Eve are trivial in terms of actual combat and hardship. As described in the above link, most player groups reach a breaking point, and once they snap, hostilities are effectively over and all that remains is cleanup (conquering their space).

Some alliances buck this trend by displaying a level of tenacity and resilience that most organizations don’t have, and for their effort their stories are the ones people remember in a game with 10 years of player-driven history behind it.

Red Alliance

Red Alliance is one of the game’s oldest surviving alliances, being created in early 2005. These days RED is only a pale shadow of it’s former strength, but back in 2006 it was the largest and most powerful russian alliance in the game. Living in the southeast and villainized by the rest of the south, RED found itself at war with an entire coalition of alliances bent on wiping them off the map. They slowly lost territory until eventually only their capital system of C-J6MT remained under their control, but they never broke, and managed to eventually retake their homeland and take part in the Great Wars against Band of Brothers. Despite their lack of status in nullsec these days, this is what many players remember when they hear about Red Alliance, and it’s a standard that most newer russian alliances try to hold themselves to.

Goonswarm

Despite their status as one of the game’s largest and most successful alliances, Goonswarm started out as a young underdog alliance in a universe that reviled new and unskilled players. Band of Brothers, widely considered the strongest alliance in the game at the time, decided that Goonswarm was a plague on the greater Eve community, and decided to snuff them out before they became too much of a problem. BoB camped the fledgling alliance into their home station in NPC Syndicate for two weeks, refusing to allow them to undock, and even remotely buying all of the station’s supplies and relisting them at exorbitant rates. After those two weeks, Goonswarm had stopped showing signs of life. They weren’t posting on the forums, and weren’t flying in nullsec. With the now infamous phrase “There are no goons.” BoB declared victory and returned home. What really happened is that for the two weeks Goonswarm was trapped into their station alliance leaders put out a gag order on the entire alliance to give the illusion of abandoning the game. They vowed to themselves that no matter what they did they would wipe BoB off the face of the game’s map forever as payment for what had been done. They allied themselves with Red Alliance, moved to Insmother, and began systematically annihilating every alliance in the south between them and BoB. Three years later, they had conquered BoB’s space and forcefully disbanded their alliance. To this day Goonswarm has had a hand in defeating no less than three different incarnations of the alliance Band of Brothers.

Band of Brothers

The Great Wars was an extended conflict that had two seperate parts, known and the first and second Great War. The First Great War began with the unveiling of the game’s first Titan by Ascendant Frontier, followed by it’s destruction by Band of Brothers, and ended with the Red Swarm Federation halted at the gates of “Fortress Delve” (consisting of the three neighboring regions of Delve, Querious, and Period Basis). With all sides thoroughly worn out from 18 months of nonstop warfare, battles slowed and the conflict petered out, with Band of Brothers and it’s allies losing nearly the entire south, but still in control of the most coveted regions in the game. The second great war didn’t go so well for them however.

WALLTREIPERS ALLIANCE

I saved the best example for last.

The conflict last summer known to everyone as “Delve 2012”, and to some as “Delve IV” or “Delve V” (it depends on how many times you’ve been there) turned out to be a complete rout. A war that was hyped up to be the clashing of two massive powers ended up being a one-sided curbstomp. The Southern Coalition managed to put up so little resistance that TEST and the CFC gave complete control of strategic subcapital fleets to whoever wanted to command them. Junior FCs ran wild through Delve blowing up anyone who would undock, and massive supercapital fleets reinforced and destroyed sovereignty structures so fast that friendly logistics couldn’t anchor their own structures fast enough. Throughout the bloodbath, a single 400 man alliance managed to maintain their sovereignty longer than anyone else, defending their besieged home while other alliances cowered or fled. WALLTREIPERS ALLIANCE (you aren’t allowed to not capitalize it), put up the kind of unrelenting resistance that puts stories like the Battle of Thermopylae to shame. They ninja-repaired their station and Territorial Control Unit, stole enemy Sovereignty Blockade Units and sold them to buy more ships to fight with, camped the gates into their system 23/7, and hunted down any ship stupid enough to light a cyno in their system. Their defense was so full-proof and went on for so much longer than anybody expected that they started to gain admirers. This tiny alliance had the heart of a lion, and pilots in the CFC wanted them to keep fighting. When word got around that WALLTREIPERS was running out of ammo to kill them with, people from the CFC petitioned to give them the ammo they needed to keep going.

Sadly, their defense eventually came to an end, but only after repelling no less than 5 full-scale attempts to take their home system of T-IPZB. WALLTREIPERS proved themselves as one of the most tenacious and capable alliances in the game had ever seen, and they did so under the most hellish circumstances imaginable.

The Brave 300Every now and again, an alliance comes along that decides fleeing isn’t on their to-do list, excuses aren’t an option, and vow to stand their ground and go down swinging. The results can be extraordinary, and are what Eve legends are made of.

About PIROne of us since 1:31 AM on 07.01.2010

Sometimes I play EVE Online.

Once in a while I write about it too. This here destructoid blog discusses the game in a more tie-wearing, serious-business fashion with less focus on readers that already play the game. For less formal 'jeans-and-a-tshirt' style EVE blogging, I have a tumblr titled A Really Bad Spaceship Game where I post quotes from Jabber, screenshots taken during ops, and write about whatever I feel like.